Race, rape, and lynching: the red record of American literature, 1890-1912

Abstract

Sandra Gunning. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 195 pp. $42.00. In this literary study of racial violence, Sandra Gunning explores the work of both black and white writers as public discourse influencing the construction of racial, gendered, and national identities. Focusing on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts by Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, Pauline Hopkins, Kate Chopin, and David Bryant Fulton, Gunning reveals how their work both reinforced and resisted prevailing malignant images of black masculinity and thereby contributed to the continual re-negotiation of the terms and boundaries of national dialogue on racial violence. Gunning uses the idea of the black male brute as the initiating concept for her study, since she sees the hypersexualized and criminalized black male body as a crucial and heavily overdetermined metaphor in an evolving national discourse on the nature of multiethnic, multiracial American society. Gunning's method of analysis draws from the previous scholarship of Trudier Harris, Hazel Carby, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Claudia Tate as she integrates the categories of race, class, and gender to reveal complex and at times contradictory readings that locate the selected texts in dialectical relationship to each other. Moving beyond critical approaches that categorize texts as racist or anti-racist, she seeks out moments of conflict around gender and racial identities in the interest of providing clearer understanding of turn-of-the-century literature on racial violence. Gunning argues that Thomas Dixon's popular race novels are mostly expressions of a profound anxiety over the maintenance of stable white identity and less register of popular white supremacy triumph over African Americans. Although Charles Chesnutt wrote in opposition to the white supremacist forces represented by Dixon, Gunning argues that Chesnutt's redemption of blackness occurs at the expense of women and that his adherence to the values of male heroism are built on pattern of female silencing. While Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) challenges white supremacist discourse on rape and white womanhood, it simultaneously sustains the stereotype of black female promiscuity. Kate Chopin's work challenges white supremacy, but only enough to liberate her white heroines. The breadth and depth of Gunning's analyses result in refreshing readings that reflect the complex relationship between race and gender in American literature. The works of Wells, Hopkins, and Fulton are seen as initiating an alternative dialogue that addressed the rape of black women in the political context of Post-Reconstruction and the narrow interpretation of mob violence as solely the lynching of black men. …